The article discusses ‘activation’ in Denmark and Norway from an ‘active society’ perspective. The argument forwarded is that activation in the two Nordic countries shows continuity over the last 50 years, where Denmark and Norway have shared much of the same policy rationale or logic. At the same time there have been discrepancies in the activation opportunities, especially during the 1970s and 1980s. Such differences should be understood in terms of differences in the level and structure of unemployment in the two countries. All too often, changes in policy programmes and related ‘discourses’ have been evaluated without taking the changing labour-market conditions into account. On occasion this has led to too hasty or imbalanced conclusions. In part this has led to a misrepresentation of the relatively generous welfare benefit regime in Denmark during the 1980s, and in part to exaggeration of the alleged ‘repressive’ or unreasonable nature of the welfare-policy reforms in Denmark in the 1990s.